Lena Dunham: The New Queen of Comedy’s First Vogue Cover

Through her hapless alter ego Hannah Horvath, Lena Dunham has brilliantly captured the anxieties and ambitions of a generation. Nathan Heller meets the hardest-working millennial in show business.

“Three bells!” someone shouts from the far end of the Girls soundstage, and in the dark beyond the blazing lights the crew grows quiet. It’s late summer, in the urban tangle of Queens, and Lena Dunham—showing no hint of exhaustion after months of writing, directing, and acting—is shooting the show’s season-three finale. She’s sitting on a bed, wearing the sort of tank top and bright-green pants favored by her character, Hannah Horvath. Standing opposite her, head in a towel, is the actress Allison Williams, who plays Hannah’s highly strung friend Marnie. A pair of cameras are trained on Dunham’s face. The sound rolls. Clapper boards snap shut: “A-camera mark!” “B-camera mark!” And in the silence that follows, Dunham transforms from one of the most powerful women in TV into the confused, questing neophyte she brings to life on-screen.

This morning, they are shooting a bedroom tête-à-tête. Over several takes, Dunham and Williams embellish the script with improvisations, trying to catch each other off guard. At one point, Dunham adds a laugh line about “chromosome sorting.” At another, she dreams up a gag about adopting chinchillas. “Let’s reset,” she says after the second take. “Did that feel closer, Jenni?”

Jenni Konner, an executive producer on the show, is seated in a director’s chair nearby. She is Dunham’s professional partner, and, in many ways, the other half of her creative mind. Where Dunham is hyperverbal, Konner is wry and laconic, but they share a fast wit and a sense of the Girls comic style. Making a quick pass through a writer’s script, Konner might fine-tune its voice, adding an “Honestly” to the start of a line for Shoshanna—Zosia Mamet’s chatterbox character—or adjusting the rhythm of a back-and-forth. (Dunham calls her “the queen of recognizing what a scene is missing.”) Konner, now in her 40s, also brings the vantage of an older generation to the show. Their dynamic is familial, too; on the set and in life, she and Dunham are nearly inseparable.

“Lena, will you tuck your necklace in, baby?” she says, as they start another take.

“Sorry, my love,” Dunham calls back, pausing to tidy herself up. Her hair, which she cut short after shooting for the second season of Girls finished, has grown out to a trim, breezy bob. She has large and attentive chestnut-colored eyes, a ready smile, and a tendency to gesture with her hands that Saturday Night Live parodied in a Girls takeoff last fall. (The skit added a new girl from Albania—Blerta, played by Tina Fey.) “Hey, Danielle,” she says now to a crew member. “Could we get that cat toy for Allison to wave at me at the end?”

“Sure . . .”

“Thanks,” she says, tossing the cat toy to Williams after a brief test of its aerodynamic properties. Williams brandishes the toy gleefully, and they pick up in the middle of the scene.

Since Girls launched in 2012, the 27-year-old Dunham has become to comic television roughly what Bob Dylan was to sixties folk: She’s not the first person to wield her form and her subject (middle-class postcollegiate life), but she does it with such unmatched skill, charisma, and vision that she’s now the genre’s uncontested master, the standard other people strive to reach. After the show won the Golden Globe for its first season, networks rushed to fill their slots with Girls-like sitcoms. Young people chase small-screen careers the way that they previously dreamed of movie-house immortality. Dunham’s ability to speak for a hyperconnected generation rich in entitled ambition but poor in practical know-how has carved a trenchant cultural portrait; in her shadow, TV comedy has started seeming relevant again—and very cool.

The show’s third season marks a turn in its development. Hannah is working a steady job in a new café run by her friend Ray (Alex Karpovsky), and once more dating the inveterately bizarre but true-of-heart Adam (Adam Driver). She’s back in touch with her imperious friend Jessa (Jemima Kirke)—who’s surfaced, impatiently, in rehab—and is trying to rebuild their rapport. “She’s involved in more solid relationships,” says Judd Apatow, one of the show’s early champions and executive producers, observing that the late 20s bring a new set of problems. Girls, praised for its unvarnished naturalism, must now depict its characters in the most authentic act of all: growing up.

For Dunham, that process started a long time ago. Though her characters tend to be muddled, haltingly motivated young women, Dunham herself is a model of industry. In addition to carrying a heavy writing, acting, directing, editing, and producing load for Girls, she has been working on a documentary film and developing a second HBO series. She’s contributed first-person essays to The New Yorker, taken the odd assignment (recently, she interviewed Judy Blume for The Believer), and will soon release her debut book: a comic memoir she composed in free time that she doesn’t really have.

“She writes constantly,” says Williams. “Late at night, early in the morning, constantly.” Dunham writes on planes; at the Girls studio; and, not infrequently, in bed. (It is her great ambition to be the sort of writer who sits down to work, but she hasn’t ever gotten there; the small white desk she set up in her apartment is used mostly by her boyfriend, Jack Antonoff, a guitarist in the indie band Fun.) She says, “I actually work pretty well within the whirlwind of my life.”

Her collaborators tout not only her rate of production but her speed. “Where it takes me 20 years to write about my 20s in a really honest way,” says Konner, “it takes her 24 hours to, like, have gone on a bad date, experienced it, had pain about it, gone home, metabolized it, and turned it into art. It’s the fastest system I’ve ever seen.” (Williams calls Dunham an “aggregator of humanity.”)

“The fact that she’s able to do it in the moment, as it’s happening, is her unique talent,” Driver says. “Maybe it’s just good genes?” He adds: “Plus we get to see each other in these weird intimate settings. Her, myself, and our boom guy Jason have just gone through a lot in a small, enclosed room.”

As much as Girls is known for its naturalism, it is famous for its startlingly frank depictions of sex—unshy, sometimes unflattering portraits that the critic Elaine Blair, in a New York Review of Books essay on the topic, praised as an “example of what sex scenes are good for.” “There was a sense that I and many women I knew had been led astray by Hollywood and television depictions of sexuality,” Dunham says. “Seeing somebody who looks like you having sex on television is a less comfortable experience than seeing somebody who looks like nobody you’ve ever met.” In Girls, she often films herself bare-breasted. Once, she did the same with Becky Ann Baker, who plays Hannah’s mother. (“They waited until I got into my 50s to say, ‘Will you show your breasts on television?’ ” Baker says in mock lamentation.) “She’s not being naked just for the sake of being naked,” observes Zosia Mamet.

In Girls’s second season, Hannah had a brief but intense dalliance with a much older, very handsome doctor (Patrick Wilson) with a Zeitgeist-appropriate Brooklyn brownstone. Dunham was surprised to find how controversial their pairing became. “Critics said, ‘That guy wouldn’t date that girl!’ ” she explains. “It’s like, ‘Have you been out on the street lately?’ Everyone dates everyone, for lots of reasons we can’t understand. Sexuality isn’t a perfect puzzle, like, ‘He has a nice nose and she has a nice nose! She’s got great breasts and he’s got great calves! And so they’re going to live happily ever after in a house that was purchased with their modeling money!’ It’s a complicated thing. I want people ultimately, even if they’re disturbed by certain moments, to feel bolstered and normalized by the sex that’s on the show.”

On the Girls set, late that morning, Dunham has left the bedroom to block out another scene. “So, let’s just read this first and see if there are any cuts or changes,” she says to Baker and Peter Scolari, the actor who plays her father: They are preparing to film a telephone conversation set partly in the Horvath home kitchen. (Later she’ll film the other half of the exchange in Hannah’s bedroom as her character applies a garish coat of makeup.) Glancing around the kitchen set, Dunham has some ideas. “I thought we could have you, like, rearranging your spice rack when the phone rings,” she says to Scolari. She instructs Baker to come through the kitchen door, holding another phone: “I recently caught my parents on two cordless phones, three feet from each other, and it was the funniest thing ever.”

Dunham, Baker, and Scolari run through the scene. “Hey, Mr. Peter?” Dunham says to Scolari. “Since you don’t have caller ID on that phone, could you say ‘Hello’ instead of ‘Honey’?” When Dunham is at work, she speaks with the cheery exactitude of someone trying to place a complicated catering order over the phone. “All right—where we at?” she asks the crew.

“We’re at ‘roll set,’ ma’am,” somebody says. “It’s yours.”

Dunham sits back in her chair. “OK, guys,” she says. “Action!”

On a chilly afternoon in autumn, Dunham calls to ask whether I want to have tea, and I meet her at the stately Brooklyn Heights building where she’s lived for the past couple of years. “I used to walk my dog by this apartment building in high school,” she says. “I was always getting in trouble for my dog peeing in the courtyard, which is technically illegal. I’m like, ‘Someday, I’m going to live in that building!’ ” After Girls took off, she moved in with a sense of private triumph.

Dunham’s apartment is quirky, well appointed, and—considering that she sits at the center of one of the most coveted television-comedy enterprises today—concertedly unostentatious. There’s a small galley kitchen, hung with a fading schoolhouse photograph of her grandmother in Connecticut and pepped up with a hot-pink Hello Kitty microwave. The dining area comprises a square four-person table. In the living room—large enough to fit a big TV, a couch, a desk, some shelves—she has hung work by her family and friends: Dunham’s mother, Laurie Simmons, is an acclaimed artist best known for her photographs of miniature, dioramic domestic scenes, while her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter celebrated for his vibrant biomorphic abstractions and top-hatted figures with phalluses for noses. (More recently, he has been exploring the female anatomy; his daughter calls the abstract drawing in the dining area “the only work of his that I could hang without people being like, ‘So, what’s the deal with that penis on your wall?’ ”)

Nearby, Dunham has arranged what she refers to as her “salon wall,” a small selection of professional-type artifacts: fan letters from Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks; a birthday drawing from the New Yorker cartoonist and Girls producer Bruce Eric Kaplan; a portrait of Zosia Mamet by Jemima Kirke; and other cherished works. Much of the furniture in the apartment Dunham took from the Girls set.

She now shares the place with Antonoff. They met on a blind date arranged by his sister, the designer Rachel Antonoff, whose work Dunham admires. Dunham had just emerged from a string of idle or exasperating romantic experiences, and her career was climbing rapidly to altitude. “I’d been like, If I never date again in my whole life, I’ll be fine with it! I want to work and rescue rabbits and be a notable eccentric!” she says. “I had a whole romantic idea about singledom, and then, of course, that’s the moment when you meet someone that you really care about.” She and Antonoff are taking a new apartment nearby in a couple of months. But, for the moment, they’re still here, in the comfortable place that’s let Dunham maintain the productively low profile she prefers.

“I have a really great private existence, almost more like a memoirist or a columnist would, and less like an actor would,” she says. “Which I enjoy, because I can’t overstate how much I hate leaving the house.” Dunham sees her apartment as an extension of herself: She couldn’t undertake bold feats of self-disclosure in public—the stories of her sexual history, the portraits of her family life, the nakedness—if she didn’t have it to return to. “No one would describe me as a private person, but I actually really am,” she explains. “It’s important for me to have a lot of time alone, and to have a lot of time in my house by myself. My entire life sort of takes place between me and my dog, my books, and my boyfriend, and my private world. To me, privacy isn’t necessarily equated with secret-keeping. What’s private is my relationship with myself.”

Dunham spends several weeks each fall in Los Angeles, where both Apatow and Konner have families: It is easiest to do video editing for one season, and brainstorming for the next, on the West Coast. “I like Los Angeles, but more than two weeks and I start to get a very sad feeling,” she explains. “You eat well there, and you take hikes, and my dog”—a rescue pet named Lamby—“loves it, but ultimately it’s not the right place for me.” In most contexts, she still feels like a Hollywood outsider. “I went early on to a party at a really famous person’s house. They had a private chef there making pizza, and I remember the dog was wearing a bow tie. Every time I looked around, it would be like, Is that someone I know from camp? No, that’s Ashton Kutcher. It was such a weird scene. I remember thinking, I don’t feel at home here, and no matter how long this is my job, I will never feel at home here. And if I do start to feel at home here”—her brow furrows—“someone should really worry about me.”

Newly back from L.A., she’s at last been able to turn most of her attention to her book, which she calls “a slightly kaleidoscopic version of a memoir.” Due to appear from Random House in the fall, the volume, illustrated by her friend Joana Avillez, is made up of unchronological autobiographical essays that, Dunham thinks, attend to her life’s milestones. In the style of her previous nonfiction, it’s an exercise in comic self-revelation, “I really will have exhausted my personal life as a subject after this book enters the world,” she says. “And I kind of feel OK about that.”

Dunham’s life has been in the limelight for a long time. When she first appeared in Vogue, in 1998, she was eleven. It was as part of a spread about “a New York pack of fashion-conscious kids”; she displayed a Helmut Lang–inspired shift she’d sewed herself, dropping confident pronouncements on the state of the late-nineties fashion industry. “I really like Jil Sander, but it’s so expensive,” she told Plum Sykes. “I find Calvin Klein really hard to respect because he’s everywhere. I view him as a clothesmonger.”

“I think I heard my mother describe someone who wasn’t an artist as a ‘monger,’ ” Dunham says today. (Her assessment of Klein has turned around in the years since.) The piece ran with some photography, but Dunham wasn’t among the kids pictured. This bothered her, especially when she recognized one of the girls who had been shot—“in trademark braces,” the caption observed—as another student at her Brooklyn school, Saint Ann’s: Jemima Kirke. The twelve-year-old Kirke was wearing “a pair of seventies patchwork trousers worn low-slung, a cashmere sweater from a flea market, and Adidas sneakers.” Dunham didn’t know Kirke but, on spying the trademark braces at a dance one night, went up to introduce herself. They became fast friends.

Behind Closed Doors at Lena Dunham's Cover Shoot

By then, Dunham had a creative identity. “Because there were two artists living and working in the house, there was always a sense that you had to be working on something,” she recalls of herself and her younger sister, Grace (currently a senior at Brown). “I remember my parents always referred to the place where we did our homework as our ‘office.’ ”

As a teenager, Dunham wrote poems, short stories, and what she calls “virtually unperformable plays,” some of which were staged through the school’s drama program. “All my plays were about abortion clinics—girls waiting in an abortion clinic, trying to make the Big Decision,” she says, an irony because, erotically, she was still naive. (Dunham’s first knowledge of sex came from A Fish Called Wanda.) She listened to Alanis Morissette, Joan Osborne, Sleater-Kinney, and Jewel (“angry girls”). She loved Friends and Saturday Night Live but reached for higher entertainment, too. “I worked at the video store, and I learned a lot about movies by shelving them,” she says. “Anything that seemed like it was from Sundance circa 1995, I watched. I loved Beautiful Girls. I loved Isabel Coixet—My Life Without Me. I remember saying to people, ‘I’m into indie movies!’ I didn’t really know what that meant.”

“She wasn’t nearly as successful in the world of kids as she was in the world of adults,” her mother recalls. “And because she wasn’t interested in a lot of other kids, she had, really, a lot of time to make stuff.”

“I thought of myself as relatively unpopular,” Dunham says. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault—I didn’t go to high school with mean kids—but I didn’t feel part of it. . . . I didn’t really start to feel like I had friends in a real way until I graduated from college and became engaged with the people I’d be engaged with professionally.”

Even in high school, though, she found good company in books; the young Dunham was a fan of Philip Roth, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, whose confessional style struck a chord. She came to regard candor as a powerful inventive tool: one that offered the energetic release of an uncorked bottle but also created a bond between artist and audience. It promised something better for her, too. “I had really bad OCD. I was really lonely at school. I felt a lot of shame,” she explains. “Seeing what I thought was people lightening their own load, or lifting their own burdens, by writing about them or singing about them just made the world seem more open.”
One fall afternoon, far from Brooklyn, Dunham takes her seat under a canvas-colored garden canopy at the Chateau Marmont and waits for some of fashion’s wunderkinds to unveil their recent work. It is the afternoon of L.A.’s CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund show, a display of new creations by the finalists of the name-making fellowship for young designers, and Dunham holds a place of honor at the end of the impromptu runway. She is dressed in an elegantly tailored, café crème–hued knee-length dress by Reed Krakoff, one of her favorite designers.

Soon after David and Victoria Beckham rush in and take their seats, the show begins. Dunham is a careful and avid observer of the stylish parade; seeing the preppy-bohème menswear of Ovadia & Sons she pivots toward Konner and begins fanning herself in a mock swoon.

Because, like Sex and the City before it, Girls traces a playful line between the fashion Zeitgeist and caricaturish excess—Shoshanna’s torqued and twisted updos, Hannah’s baby-doll stylings and high-wattage makeup—some people have presumed that Dunham’s sartorial palate is as unformed as her character’s. It’s not true. One of Dunham’s babysitters was Zac Posen; he hand-made her a high school–graduation dress in the early 2000s, and still frequently sends her his latest creations. Her taste these days is both exacting and eclectic. Often she wears Erdem, Marni, Miu Miu, Peter Jensen. “I’ve always loved Comme des Garçons; I’ve always loved Yohji Yamamoto,” she says. “I’m into Charlotte Olympia flats. I really love a Prada bag because they always have one weird detail that you didn’t think about. I always wear J Brand jeans because the waist is high . . . a low-cut jean is a problematic thing for me.” As a self-described “jewelry hound,” Dunham often finds herself donning work by Delfina Delettrez, Pamela Love, Irene Neuwirth, and Suzannah Wainhouse. In casual settings, she prefers bulky, playful necklaces—“like a kindergarten art teacher,” she jokes—which she buys from artisans on Etsy.

In addition to tracking the fashion world closely, she’s become a kind of spokesperson for young women who want to express themselves stylishly but with personal whimsy, and a vocal critic of the stereotype that fashion belongs only to a tiny group of superslender people terrified of breaking rules. For almost as long as Dunham’s work has been in the public eye, she’s spoken openly and often about her body type, pointing out that not every strong and enviable woman on the air must resemble a runway model. “She’s an individual—that’s how she carries herself in her life, and that’s how she carries herself in her own personal style,” says Erdem Moralioglu, who designed Dunham an elegant but edgy floor-length black dress for last year’s punk-theme Met gala. “I thought, How great—Lena has these amazing tattoos on her back and arms. Let’s have a sheer panel in the back and take off the sleeves!”

Dunham’s comfort in her own skin—even when bared—has become part of her cool iconoclasm. It’s the reason many people see her as the voice for a new generation of empowered young women, and it’s slowly helped to shift the norms of female charisma on-screen. After Howard Stern referred to her, last year, as a “little fat chick,” Dunham told David Letterman she was delighted by the label; she joked that she wanted her gravestone to be, “like, ‘She was a little fat chick, and she got it going!’ ” Apatow commends her resilience: “The praise hasn’t thrown her, and the criticism hasn’t thrown her, which is remarkable. I would be naked and crying under my pillow.”

A couple of hours after the show, Dunham has changed into a strapless, lime-green evening dress, also from Reed Krakoff’s resort collection, to cohost a dinner for the young designers at Bouchon, in Beverly Hills. “I love clothes that have eccentricity and wit to them,” she says. She admires her mother’s designer wardrobe and sartorial freedom—an approach Dunham summarizes as “ ‘We’re artists! We can do what we want!’ My mother’s six inches taller than me and ten pounds lighter, but somehow I can wear her stuff,” Dunham says. “Now sometimes she borrows my clothes, which is very flattering. That did not used to happen.”

Directing appeals to Dunham, she says, because it lets her make good on every dream she’s ever had. “I wanted to be a fashion designer. I wanted to be a babysitter. I wanted to be an architect,” she explains. We are sitting in Brooklyn Heights’s Happy Days Diner, an old Saint Ann’s hangout, and the hurried sotto voce of three teenage girls drifts from the next booth. “Every fantasy job you have as a child is encompassed in the act of filmmaking.” At Oberlin, where her career first took form, she began her first feature-length film, Creative Nonfiction. When that made it to the South by Southwest festival, Dunham flew to Austin, Texas, where she found herself in a car with a filmmaker named Alex Karpovsky. They hit it off. “Someone so young, their voice is typically much more derivative,” Karpovsky explains. “Lena picks up a lot of subtleties in human behavior and language and interactions.” Dunham, who was starting to attract attention with a popular Web series, Delusional Downtown Divas, wrote him a part in the feature she was then working on—as she did for Kirke, her mother, her sister, and some other friends.

Tiny Furniture, the result, was a preternaturally mature indie film made largely in her parents’ apartment, on a $45,000 budget that Dunham raised herself from private donors. It follows Aura, a college graduate at loose ends—a kind of proto–Hannah Horvath—as she returns to New York to live with her family.

The film asks to be viewed autobiographically, but its artist mom is distinct from the real Laurie Simmons. And though Dunham was, at that point, a recent college graduate living with her parents, those who know her say the two are unalike. “That character couldn’t write a script like Tiny Furniture and get the movie made,” Simmons says. “When she lived at home, after college, I would go into her bedroom late at night, and she’d have fallen asleep amid a heap of cell phone, laptop, books, scripts, pencils, papers. She was in her bed covered with work.” Dunham had already begun the elaborate shadow theater that she would carry into Girls and public life: a self-inflected world that was true enough to life to put in the line of scrutiny, but different enough to leave her some maneuvering room behind the screen.

Tiny Furniture won the Best First Screenplay title at the Independent Spirit Awards. Today, it’s part of the Criterion Collection. It also brought Dunham to the attention of Judd Apatow, who offered her help and counsel if she ever needed it. “I felt an instant connection to her work, because it reminded me of movies that I admired,” he says. Around the same time, HBO called her in for a meeting and commissioned her to write four episodes of a series. “It was that thing of ignorance being your best friend,” she says after lunch (turkey-burger melts) has arrived. “I didn’t really know what a pitch was. I sort of just started talking about the kind of show I wanted to see. Like, ‘I haven’t seen a show about people like my friends, who just finished college and are really confused. It’s that moment between being a kid and being an adult. Text etiquette, blah-blah-blah.’ ”

Within days of the show’s debut, in April 2012, it was clear that it would be one of the most discussed dramatic efforts of the year. No one was more surprised than Dunham. “I expected ‘I like it!’ or ‘It’s annoying!’ But the kind of ‘What’s this doing to our culture?’ conversation was shocking,” she says. So was the scrutiny it brought. “Especially if you were a teenage girl who felt a little bit invisible, who felt a little bit like”—she puts on plaintive voice—“ ‘Boys don’t see me, my teachers don’t give me good grades. . . .’ It took me a little while to play catch-up.”

Many of her biggest mistakes, Dunham says, have taken place on Twitter. At one point, she upset, as she puts it, “the entire country of Canada,” by mindlessly tweeting a quip about dressing up as the victim of a pair of notorious north-of-the-border serial killers—“me, at three in the morning in Europe, being like, ‘What’s a funny joke about a Lifetime movie?’ ”

In such moments, she thinks about an observation Antonoff made one day when she was feeling low. “He’s like, ‘You know what’s hard? People want the person who wants to share it all. But they want the person who wants to share it all minus foibles and mistakes and fuckups. They want cute mistakes. They don’t want real mistakes.’ If I placed that many censors on myself, I wouldn’t be able to continue to make the kinds of things that I make. And so I just sort of know there are going to be moments where I take it one step too far.”

Like Mary Richards, Murphy Brown, and Carrie Bradshaw—women who wanted just a little more from their times—Hannah Horvath is a creature of her moment. Over poached eggs and quinoa at Soho House in West Hollywood, Jenni Konner tells me that she and Dunham have spent some time dreaming up various flamboyant ways for Girls to end. “We were at South by Southwest, in separate rooms, talking on the phone to each other, lying in bed, and I think we were just trying to figure out how everyone died—like Six Feet Under?” she says. In more earnest moods, they wonder about Hannah’s fate in life. “I go back and forth constantly about whether I think Adam is right for her,” she says. “As he’s evolved, he seems righter for her. But would we really wish a crazy actor on anyone?”

Dunham says, “I do want to see the characters into a new phase—from early 20s into late 20s seems a good chunk of time. But I have no interest, at this point, in marrying them off or seeing their children.” She would rather end the show a bit too early rather than a bit too late; she and Konner are thinking, vaguely, of a terminus in the next three years, whenever the moment and conditions feel right.

There’s Dunham’s own next stage to think of, too. She and Konner are launching their own production company, called A Casual Romance. First up is a documentary they’ve been making about Hilary Knight, the 87-year-old writer and Eloise illustrator, and a new TV series for HBO based on the life of Betty Halbreich, the pioneering Bergdorf Goodman personal shopper, who is also in her 80s. They hope to launch projects and then turn them over to talented filmmakers (as they did with the Knight documentary, directed by Matt Wolf). Their general subject, as they see it, is the challenges and triumphs of modern womanhood, and if Girls has been a young, trepidatious look forward, subjects like Halbreich will allow them to assess lifetimes of female accomplishment from the vantage of age.

“I’m still young, and when you’re young it’s all fast-moving, the way a baby grows in the first two months of its life,” Dunham says. As many onlookers have pointed out, her life quandaries now are hardly comparable to those that her struggling young characters face; her skill, effort, and confidence have carried her so far behind the realm of basic young-adult problems that, at one point, I ask whether she may have achieved her way out of a subject. Dunham smiles and gives the sort of charmingly multivocal answer—part blundering ingenue, part self-aware professional—she is known for. “I still go to a party and say something embarrassing to someone, and then write them a weird e-mail about it the next day, and then write them a text because I think they didn’t get the e-mail,” she says. “No matter what happens with your level of success, you still have to deal with all the baggage that is yourself.”